For lovers of documentary film, culture, and the unexpected, the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival is an annual autumn ritual in New York City. Begun in 1977 as a one-time event to mark the world-famous anthropologist's 75th birthday and her 50 years at the Museum, the Festival promoted cross-cultural understanding through cinema. Informal screenings were set up in classrooms, the culture halls, and any other space where a projector could fit, and curious attendees filled the Museum to watch a wealth of international cultural and ethnographic cinema. In 1977, film-festival culture in New York was in its infancy, and the Mead Festival provided a rare opportunity to view work of this kind.

Fast-forward the clock 25 years and the cinematic landscape looks remarkably different. In New York City alone there seems to be another film festival every month. The Festival is now a week-long celebration of international cinema, attracts filmmakers from around the world, and showcases a broad range of documentary, from indigenous community media to experimental non-fiction and animation. Many of the submissions come from emerging artists; others are from film and video makers whose works have been regularly featured in the Festival.

In honor of its 25th anniversary the Festival presents Spotlight on 25, a special showcase of select filmmakers who have made long-standing contributions to documentary cinema and to the spirit of the Mead Festival. Each will present encore screenings of earlier celebrated films and will unveil new work, or work never before seen in the United States. All of these artists are award-winning filmmakers who have been celebrated at film festivals around the world, and are recognized for their in-depth collaboration and commitment to the subjects of their films.

Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson
This Australian filmmaking duo has produced award-winning documentaries for more than two decades. They met at the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC), where Connolly spent 14 years as a journalist and foreign correspondent, and where Anderson worked as a researcher after studying economics and sociology at Columbia University in New York City. With Bob operating the camera and Robin recording sound, their films have pushed the boundaries of the medium, incorporating dramatic structure and tension into works marked by quiet intensities and intimacy. Their debut, First Contact, is a classic study of first culture contact in the New Guinea highlands. Their follow-ups, Joe Leahy's Neighbors and Black Harvest, capture the shifting politics in that area over a period of ten years. Selections from these works, know as The Papua New Guinea Series, will be shown on Saturday, November 3, at 1:00 p.m. Their work has moved closer to home with their latest production, Facing the Music (Wednesday, 6:00 p.m.), a riveting and dramatic report from the battlefields of academia in Sydney, Australia.

Victor Kossakovsky
Victor Kossakovsky studied at the Moscow Film School and has worked in the Leningrad Documentary Studios since 1989. Currently based in St. Petersburg, he has produced some of the most richly textured cinema to come out of post-Soviet Russia. Weaving together fragments of human interaction into dramatic narratives, his work is situated within the everyday, but it engages such epic themes as destiny, love, and death, creating a meditation on the human condition. The Belovs (Tuesday, 3:00 p.m.) gained international acclaim in 1992 for its remarkable treatment of the psychology of family dynamics as played out by adult siblings living in rural Russia. His most recent work, I Loved You…(Three Romances) (Wednesday, 6:00 p.m.; Saturday, November 10, 6:00 p.m.), traces three generations of love, from an elderly couple coping with imminent death to a kindergarten romance. Victor Kossakovsky will be present discuss his work.

Melissa Llewelyn-Davies
British anthropologist and filmmaker Melissa Llewelyn-Davies studied at University College, London; attended Harvard University; and conducted fieldwork among the Maasai in southern Kenya over the course of two decades. Trained in feminist theory, she brings this perspective to her fieldwork and filmmaking in such work as The Women's Olamal (Monday, 7:00 p.m.), a remarkable account of an effort by Maasai women to persuade their male elders to take action and hold a controversial fertility ceremony. Her work has primarily been produced for British television. While best known for her work in Africa, her other productions reflect remarkable regional and topical diversity. The Festival presents selections of this work, which is as vital today as when first released. Forgiving the Blood (Saturday, November 3, 8:00 p.m.), a look at nationalism in Yugoslavia, is a chilling precursor to the bloody and still unresolved war that has defined the region for nearly a decade. The Team on B-6 (Saturday, November 3, 2:30 p.m.) offers a glimpse of a busy hospital ward in East London through the poignant and candid stories of its nurses. Melissa Llewelyn-Davies will be present to discuss her work.

Kim Longinotto
Kim Longinotto studied documentary filmmaking at the National Film and Television School in England. In her signature intimate, observational style, and with small, all-female crews, she enters the worlds of strong women who are marginalized by mainstream society. The bulk of her work has been set in Japan, Egypt, and Iran. The Festival will screen Shinjuku Boys (Sunday, 3:00 p.m.), which explores the lives of women living and working as men in Tokyo. It will unveil her latest work, Runaway (Saturday, November 3, 5:30 p.m.; Saturday, November 10, 4:00 p.m.), a return collaboration with the Iranian anthropologist Ziba Mir-Hosseini (Divorce Iranian Style) that takes us inside a shelter for young women in Tehran. Kim Longinotto will be present to discuss work.

David and Judith MacDougall
This filmmaking team has made dozens of works, together and independently, since the late 1960s. The American-born couple has filmed in Kenya and Uganda among the Jie and Turkana pastoral peoples, in Australia with indigenous communities, and most recently in India. Both David and Judith studied film at UCLA. As teachers and film practitioners, they have been key figures in developing and expanding participatory styles of filmmaking, and David has written extensively on theoretical issues within visual anthropology and cinema. Their work was the subject of the Mead's second Festival retrospective in 1980. The Festival will screen Lorang's Way (Saturday, November 3, 3:00 p.m.), part of the Turkana Trilogy, which follows the head of a homestead as he confronts impending changes. The couple's new respective works, With Morning Hearts (Monday, 6:00 p.m.), David's latest installment on the Doon School, a prep school for boys in India, and Diya, (Saturday, November 3, 5:00 p.m.), Judith's newest film, which looks at one family's involvement in the production of terra cotta oil lamps used in Hindu ceremonies, will have their U.S. premieres at the Festival. David MacDougall will be present to discuss their work.

Dennis O'Rourke
Since the 1970s, Dennis O'Rourke, a self-taught photojournalist, has been producing provocative and often controversial films based in Papua New Guinea, the Pacific, and his native Australia. His films blur the boundaries between fiction, fact, and "political correctness." The Festival will showcase two pivotal early works: Half-Life: A Parable for the Nuclear Age (Monday, 6:00 p.m.), a chilling examination of the official government cynicism behind U.S. nuclear testing in the Pacific, and Cannibal Tours (Sunday, 1:00 p.m.), a masterful documentary with a dramatic and ironic tinge that turns the tables on the perception of the "exotic other" as Western tourists travel up the Sepik River. His latest digital production, Cunnamulla (Saturday, November 3, 8:00 p.m.; Saturday, November 10, 2:00 p.m.), about a rural Australian town, explores the intersecting lives of a working-class community of whites and aborigines. Dennis O'Rourke will be present to discuss his work.

Alanis Obomsawin
A member of the Abenaki Nation, Alanis Obomsawin is one of Canada's most distinguished documentary filmmakers and the winner of multiple awards for her contribution to the visual and media arts. For 31 years, Obomsawin has directed documentaries at the National Film Board of Canada, and has devoted her career to giving voice to Canada's native communities. The Festival will present her 1986 work, Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (Thursday, 8:00 p.m.), a moving tribute to Richard Cardinal, a Métis adolescent and foster child who committed suicide. It will also screen the most recent of her landmark series on the Mohawk rebellions that shook Canada in 1990, Rocks at Whiskey Trench (Wednesday, 6:00 p.m.), along with selections of her new work-in-progress, Listuguj (working title) (Thursday, 8:00 p.m.), which looks at the contentious issue of First Nation treaty rights in Canada. Alanis Obomsawin will be present to discuss her work.